Jason Fry argues in a post making the rounds that we’re entering an era in which sports journalists will compete for audience directly with the teams they cover.
What Fry writes is true, and has been for some time. It’s hard to find a local newspaper website that offers a richer multimedia experience than that of pro teams in its market.
Right now, this stuff is mostly marketing. But as sports organizations become more sure-footed digitally, they will become journalists’ competitors. And that will lead them to reassess bargains struck with newspapers generations ago.
via Rules of the game change as sports journalists compete against teams they cover | Poynter.
Fry notes the recent stance by Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban that it makes little sense for him to provide digital-only outlets with access to the locker room, and believes others may follow suit: “… at the very least, sports journalists will face powerful new competitors with unbeatable access.”
Again, this is already the case. Media outlets conceive features, approach clubs about doing them, and are denied the access they need. Those same features later turn up on the club’s website, produced in house.
Fry continues:
My fear is that journalists will trumpet the public’s right to know, only to find that sports fans are largely content with in-house stories, indie blogging, highlights on demand and athlete tweets, and will dismiss talk of journalism as a civic mission as special pleading.
Many fans are indeed content with this. The huge audiences attracted by team websites are proof. But I doubt pro sports franchises will ever go as far as they need to go to completely own their markets. They could take the local sports media out at the knees, simply by poaching the top journalists in their markets to write in-house, with the promise of full editorial independence. But they won’t do it. What president/CEO would allow an employee to publish on the team website that it’s time for the president/CEO to be fired? And what employee would be willing to publish such an opinion?
People often argue that sports franchises are just businesses like any other, but they aren’t. The sense of civic ownership that they engender among fans makes them more like public institutions, almost like government. We’ve always said in our newsroom that if relations with the top team in our market ever deteriorated to the point where they revoked our access, we’d buy season tickets for our writers to cover the team from the stands. And we would, because there will always be fans who want them covered like government: independently.
